loyish' John Moore is ew Transport Secretary
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Last week's Government iffle, prompted by the reent of Education Secre3ir Keith Joseph, has led the fourth change of ;port Secretary since the ervatives came to power years ago.
tholas Ridley has suc Kl Kenneth Baker — Sir
successor — as Envient Secretary, John .e, Treasury Financial Ilary, is the new Trans-Secretary.
)(ire's promotion to the Let has been anticipated nne time.
aoyish looking 48, he has on the fringe of the Cab'or some time and many Oht he might have been oted in the re-shuffle last n.
)(ire has been one of the main architects of the Government's privatisation programme in his job as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, where he has been since the 1983 election.
He has made countless speeches extolling the virtues of privatisation and has been instrumental in the sudden increase in the pace of privatisation since its early beginning.
Moore started off in Government as a Junior Minister in the Department of Energy and was Minister responsible for coal in 1981 when the miners nearly went on strike and were bought off. He is an honorary member of the National Union of Mineworkers.
Married to a former vice chairman of the Conservative party, Moore has the mid-Atlantic look of many young politicians, which is hardly surprising as in the Fifties he was a precinct captain for the democratic party in Chicago when Mayor Daly was in charge.
Moore, keen supporter of Premier Margaret Thatcher, will be keen to press ahead with privatisation and other radical matters. There will be no slowing up in the privatisation of the National Bus Company, although he might listen a little more carefully than Ridley's critics say he did over the question of bus deregulation.
Moore's name has already cropped up in CM. As an Energy Minister, he spoke at the Scania/CM energy conference in 1980 and last year, in his capacity as a constituency MP, he took up the case of the death of a 16-year-old who died in a truck which crashed in the hands of an unlicensed 22-year-old driver.
Tory Transport Secretaries since 1979 were Norman Fowler (1979-81), David Howell (1981-83), Tom King (1983), Nicholas Ridley (198386) and now John Moore.